Chapter 3　Government and Politics

Section A　Government and Politics of the United Kingdom

The U. K. is a constitutional monarchy: succession to the British throne is hereditary. The head of state is a king or a queen, but the king or queen is just the symbol of the whole nation, and the power to run the country rests with the elected Parliament, which is headed by a Prime Minister in association with his cabinet. The Parliament operates with the two-party system, and the two major parties play the roles as the Government and the Opposition.

1. The Constitution

The constitution of the U. K. is a set of laws and principles under which the U. K. is governed. Unlike many other nations, the British Constitution is not written down in one single official document. Much of the Constitution is written down, but it is not systematically codified into a single document.

The main components of the British Constitution are Statutory Law, Common Law, and Conventions. A statute is a formal written enactment of a legislative authority that governs a state, a city, or a county, and statutory laws are Acts of Parliament written down in actual laws and passed by Parliament at one time or another in the course of history. For example, the Bill of Rights in 1689 laid down a number of things that future monarchs could not do, and it extended the powers of the Parliament. The Parliament Act 1911 asserted the supremacy of the House of Commons by limiting the power of the House of Lords in law-making. Common law is deduced from custom or legal precedents and interpreted in court cases by judges. Conventions are rules which are not written down, but everyone agrees that those rules must be followed in practice, and are also regarded as vital to the working of government. Any attempt to flout this convention would be just as serious constitutionally as any attempt to ignore a written law.

2. The Parliament

The Parliament is the supreme legislative body in the U. K., and the Parliament alone possesses legislative supremacy and thereby ultimate power over all other political bodies in the U. K. and its territories. The British Parliament consists of three elements: the Monarch, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. Before a Bill can become a law, it has to be passed by the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and finally go to the Monarch for his or her signature. The Parliament is an essential part of U. K. politics, and its main roles are examining and challenging the work of the government, debating and passing all laws, and enabling the government to raise taxes, etc..

The Monarch

The British monarch is hereditary. Although the monarch's powers are limited by law and Parliament, the Monarch is a symbol of the tradition and unity of the British state, and still retains great government and state functions.

The present monarch is Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ, who has reigned since February 6th 1952. Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ is the constitutional monarch of 16 sovereign states (known as the Commonwealth realms) and their territories and dependencies, as well as head of the 53-member Commonwealth of Nations. The Queen is the symbol of the whole nation. In law, she is head of the executive, an integral part of the legislature, head of the judiciary, the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces and the "supreme governor" of the Church of England. The formal title of the U. K. government is Her Majesty's Government, all official letters and documents bear the initials OHMS (On Her Majesty's Service), the armed forces are called "Royal Army" , and even the Opposition Party in the Parliament is named as "Her Majesty's Opposition" .

The Queen participates in various important acts of government. For example, she summons, prorogues and dissolves Parliament; she confirms major public appointments such as government ministers, judges, diplomats, Church of England bishops and the new Prime Minister after the election. In international affairs, as Head of State, she has the power to declare war, make peace, recognize foreign states and conclude treaties. In all these instances, the Queen can only act on the advice which is arrived at after policies and decisions have been fully examined and debated in Parliament. The principal role of the Queen today is symbolic, and she must represent the nation's present-day hopes and ideals as well as its historical past.

The House of Lords

The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament, which consists of the Lords Spiritual and the Lords Temporal. Members of the House of Lords are known as "Lords of Parliament" , who are not elected but either inherit their title or are appointed by the Government or shadow cabinet. The Lords Spiritual includes archbishops and prominent bishops of the Church of England. The Lords Temporal refers to those lords who are either life peers or hereditary peers, although the hereditary right to the House of Lords was abolished for all but 92 peers in 1999.

The House of Lords and the House of Commons share the same building of the Westminster Palace in London, and up to the beginning of the 20th century, the House of Lords had equal power with the House of Commons; however, the Parliament Act 1911 effectively abolished the power of the House of Lords to prevent the passing of legislation approved by the House of Commons. Nowadays, the powers of the Lords in legislation are very limited. In addition, the House of Lords has undergone some major reforms in membership and orgnization after 1999 when the House of Lords Act was passed.

The main function of the House of Lords is to bring the wide experience of its members into the process of lawmaking. It regularly reviews and amends bills from the Commons. In other words, the non-elected House is to act as a chamber of revision, complementing but not rivaling the elected House.

The House of Commons

The House of Commons is the lower house of the Parliament, and it is the center of the parliamentary power. The Commons is a democratically elected body, consisting of 650 members (since the 2010 general election), who are known as Members of Parliament (MPs). Members are elected through the first-past-the-post system[1] by electoral districts known as constituencies. They hold their seats until Parliament is dissolved (a maximum of five years after the preceding election). Each member is elected by and represents an electoral district, and the number of seats varies a little because of changes in the population.

The House of Commons was originally far less powerful than the House of Lords, but today its legislative powers greatly exceed those of the Lords. Since the passage of Parliament Act 1911 and 1949, the House of Commons has become the dominant branch of the Parliament, both in theory and in practice. The party which holds the majority of "seats" in the House of Commons forms the government, its leader acting as the Prime Minister. The Government is primarily responsible to the House of Commons.

The House of Commons plays the key part in the activities of the Parliament as a whole, and it performs many important functions. For example, it considers, proposes and drafts new laws, and it can even restrain the actions of the government. Moreover, it has the power to supervise finance. The government cannot legally spend any money without permission from the House of Commons. In addition, it can influence future government policy.

3. The Government

The British government is the supreme administrative institution which manages state affairs, and it refers to the various departments and their agencies under the leadership of the Prime Minister. The Cabinet is the core of leadership of the government, and it is composed of the Prime Minister and heads of the most important departments. The Prime Minister and the Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Monarch, to the Parliament, to their political party and ultimately to the electorate.

The Prime Minister is the learder of the majority party in the Parliament. After each general eletion, the monarch will ask the leader of the winning party to be the Prime Minister and form a new Cabinet. Ministers of the Crown, and especially Cabinet Ministers, are selected primarily from the elected members of the House of Commons, and also from the House of Lords, by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is the head of the government, and has the last word in deciding government policy. He or she can control the Parliament and influence other parties, and recently he or she is the most powerful leader in Britain.

4. The Judiciary

The Judiciary of the U. K. is not a single body, and it is rather complicated. Each of the separate legal systems in England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland has their own judiciary. The legal system of Northern Ireland is similar to that of England and Wales, but Scotland has a distinct legal system based on Roman law.

Justices of the Supreme Court

The judges of the Supreme Court of the U. K. are known as Justices of the Supreme Court, and they are also Privy Counsellors. Justices of the Supreme Court are granted the courtesy title Lord or Lady for life.

The Supreme Court is a relatively new Court being established in October, 2009. Formerly, the Highest Court of Appeal in the U. K. was the House of Lords Appellate Committee made up of Law Lords. After the coming into force of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, those Law Lords become judges of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is headed by the President and Deputy President of the Supreme Court and is composed of a further ten Justices of the Supreme Court.

Tribunal Judiciary

The U. K. tribunal system is headed by the Senior President of Tribunals, and it is part of the national system of administrative justice with tribunals classed as non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs). They are not an integral part of any government department, and they carry out their work at arm's length from Ministers, although Ministers are ultimately responsible to the Parliament for the activities of bodies sponsored by their department.

5. Political Parties and Elections

Political Parties

There are many parties in Britain, but three parties currently dominate the national political landscape: the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, and the Liberal Democrats.

The modern Conservative Party was founded in 1834 and is an outgrowth of the Tory movement or party which began in 1678. The Conservative Party is the main centre-right political party because the Conservatives are opposed to great changes in society and have a belief in private enterprise and freedom from state control. The Conservative Party is supported by those who have something to "conserve" , such as landowners and businessmen, often from the middle and upper-middle class. Generally speaking, the more you have in society, the more likely you are to be a conservative.

The Labour Party was created by the growing trade union movement at the end of the 19th century, and at first it was called the Labour Representation Committee. The Labour Party was founded in 1900 and formed its first government in 1924. Since that time, the Labour and Conservative parties have been dominant, with the Liberal Democrats also holding a significant number of seats. The Labour Party is the party of the reformist, non-revolutionary left, because it believes in the pursuit of greater social and economic equality, and aims at the nationalization of the means of production, distribution and exchange. They see the government as the right body to act as a "redistributive" agent: transferring wealth from the richer to the poorer by means of taxing the richer part of the society and providing support to the poorer part, and to provide a range of public services available to all, such as health, education and public transport.

There are several minor parties, such as the Liberal Democrats, the Communist Party, the national parties of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, etc., but they are rather weak. Of them, the Liberal Democrats won the 2010 general election and entered government for the first time as part of a coalition, and became the third largest party in the Parliament, focusing on Constitutional and Political Reforms. However, at the 2015 general election, the party was reduced to eight MPs, and at the 2017 general election, the party returned twelve MPs.

Elections

Every five years a general election is held in Britain. Elections are held in every constituency to decide which individuals shall represent them in the House of Commons. The whole U. K. is usually divided into 650 electoral constituencies. Each constituency has approximately an equal size of population, and elects one member to the House of Commons.

Any citizen over the age of 18 (with a few exceptions, such as criminals, lunatics, and members of the House of Lords) can vote in the constituency where he or she usually resides, and no person may vote in more than one constituency. During the general election, the political parties launch electoral campaigns, such as advertisements in newspaper, leaflets, and party political broadcasts on radio and television.

On the day of the election, voters go to their local polling station, have their names checked in the register, and are given the ballot paper with the candidates' names listed on it. Then each voter puts a cross beside the name of the candidate for whom he or she wishes to vote, folds the paper, and puts it into the ballot-box. When the voting closes at the end of the day, the sealed ballot-boxes are taken to one center in the constituency and votes are counted in the presence of the candidates. The candidate who receives the largest number of votes wins the election, and will go to Westminster as MP for the constituency. The party which wins over half of the constituencies is the majority in the House of Commons, and forms the new government.

6. The Commonwealth

The Commonwealth of Nations is the successor of the British Empire, and it is not a political union, but an intergovernmental organization of 54 independent member states (one of whose membership is currently suspended), in which countries with diverse social, political and economic backgrounds are equal in status. The member states cooperate within a framework of common values and goals, such as the promotion of democracy, human rights, individual liberty, egalitarianism, free trade, multilateralism and world peace, etc.. Membership in the Commonwealth is expressed in cooperation, consultation, mutual assistance, and the periodic meeting of national leaders. The symbol of their free association is the Head of the Commonwealth, which is a ceremonial position currently held by Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ. On the second Monday in March each year, Commonwealth Day is celebrated, and it is an annual event during which all member countries of the Commonwealth celebrate their links.